Lady in the Lake(66)
I pay for our drinks, or try. She picks up the check, says she’ll expense it. Says a newspaper reporter can’t have sources buying her anything. I wonder where she heard that one? I pick up checks for reporters all the time, send them whiskey at Christmas, hams at Easter.
We part ways at the corner of Charles and Mulberry. It’s close to dusk, but she says she lives only a block away.
“Do you live up this way?” she asks me.
“Oh, I’ll just catch the Charles Street bus,” I say, not answering her question.
Once I’m on my own, I take a circuitous route, although it’s not as if anyone is following me. I’m heading to Leon’s, a discreet place on Park Avenue, not even ten blocks from where she lives, but it’s a whole different universe.
Once there, I realize all I want is a drink. I don’t have the energy for company. A burden lifts the second I walk through the door at Leon’s. It’s just a relief sometimes to have a drink in a place where I’m allowed to be myself, in total. I can finally be me. Not Donald Weinstein, macher, mensch, the hard-driving chief of staff for a guy who could be governor in eight years. I used to be just a muldoon, a foot soldier, but now I’m a b’hoy, calling the shots, making the deals, getting things done. I’ll know I’ve really made it when I have a nickname, like Harry “White Shoes” McGuirk, or even Shell Gordon, who’s nursing a beer in the corner. I don’t care what my nickname is, as long as it isn’t fagalah.
My life, my preferences—plenty of people know, but no one ever talks about it. I guess people—my boss, my sister—think they’re doing me a favor, ignoring the obvious, making jokes about “Baltimore bachelors.” I have two friends, Ron and Bill, they share a little house in an out-of-the-way neighborhood up in the Northwest, and everybody seems to think they’re just two swinging single guys, on the prowl for women. Ron drives a flashy little sports car, they’re both handsome guys. I was over there on Halloween last year and the boy across the street came to the door, trick-or-treating, dressed as a woman. We all had a good laugh at that, gave the kid extra candy. One day, he’ll look back, connect the dots, a house full of men at a Halloween party. Heck, maybe one day he’ll be one of us. Who knows? I was in my teens before I figured it out, in my twenties before I dared to act on my desires. And I have to be so careful, while the Ezekiel Taylors of the world just have to avoid embarrassing their wives.
An early mentor once told me that the secret to getting by at work was to carry a legal pad and frown; everyone assumes you’re doing something important. But I feel as if that’s my life, too, that I am charging down the streets of Baltimore with an invisible legal pad always in my hand, brow furrowed in concentration, and no one sees what I’m really up to. “He’s married to his job,” my mother says, with equal parts pride and exasperation.
It’s true. What other option do I have?
July 1966
July 1966
She had worried that Judith’s brother might insist on walking her to the door, maybe even make a pass. As soon as she was a block west of Charles Street, she hailed a cab.
Men were no help, after all, she had decided. Men kept each other’s secrets. Men put men first, in the end. It made no sense for Cleo Sherwood to be killed by some strange man in a turtleneck who was never seen again. Sure, it could have happened. Bad things happened to women all the time. But Maddie was sure that Ezekiel Taylor was the link. And no one cared because no one cared about Cleo. Well, Maddie cared. She cared enough to challenge Mr. Taylor’s alibi. And there was only one way to do that, one person.
The cab took her to one of the still-grand blocks near the park. Not that far, her mind registered, from the lake, the fountain. Her own maternal grandparents had lived on this street once; The Park School had started not far from here. It was still relatively early. She was betting that Mr. Taylor was not someone who rushed home. Married men who dallied with young women did not rush home; Maddie knew that about them. She knew more than she wanted to know about married men. It was time to put that knowledge to use. Just as she had drawn on her memories of her old necking spot to find Tessie Fine’s body, she would now rely on her regrets to inform her quest into the life of a young woman who had made a similar mistake. Maddie had never confronted her lover’s wife. But she would come face-to-face with the woman married to Cleo Sherwood’s lover.
The Taylor house was a grande dame among ruffians. Most of the other big old houses had been subdivided; there were telltale signs of a neighborhood losing whatever self-respect it once had. The tiny yards were not being maintained and in the meticulous hedges guarding the Taylor home, someone had left a Zagnut wrapper. The better-off Negroes were beginning to abandon the neighborhood, just as the Jews of Milton’s generation had. These beautiful old town houses—not rowhouses, not here, they were too wide, too architecturally distinct—had stood for so much once. For dreams and aspirations. But there would come a day when they were all cut up into makeshift apartments. She was surprised the Taylors had remained.
Once the cab let her out, she stood for several minutes on the sidewalk, knowing how out of place she looked, not caring. She was tired of caring what others thought about her, more tired of how they thwarted her. First and foremost, Shell Gordon and those who worked for him. But also the cops, reporters, even Judith’s brother Donald. The world kept telling her to look away, to pay no attention to an age-old system, in which men thrived and inconvenient women disappeared.